The Spaice series
Wouldn’t it be nice to freewheel in the kitchen at least a little. Have the confidence to throw a bit more of something in, a bit less of something else, even start to make new dishes yourself. Balance flavours, colours, textures.
Like many arts, there is an underpinning science that can help you navigate. Science won’t answer all the questions and solve all the problems, but understanding just a little of what’s happening and what you’re aiming to do empowers and emboldens.
This is a journey of just that, understanding some general principles and concepts. Each book aims to dig deeper and empower more. At least that’s the theory, I’ve only finished the first one “Inner Spaice” so far. Come along for the ride.
Inner Spaice
Inner Spaice is the first of a series of cookbooks, which started as some personal notes to reconcile illegible squiggles of ink on printouts of multiple different recipes to be able to reproduce them. Spaice itself is the expedition of someone who, for no particular reason, embarked on learning how to cook. Come along for the ride!
The word derives from first starting to cook to clear some brain space of the noise of the world at the time (a retrospective observation) and became more about the food and the cooking, hence the spice. Spaice is simply a meld of the two words. And if you squint at the cover, the a should disappear.
Watch this Spaice ... a journey unfolding
Find out how someone with a biological sciences and medical background, attempts to understand the science that underpins the processes of cooking and explain it in a way that everyone can understand.
How it All Started...
If you think about it, the electronic age is really quite amazing in that all the information you need to learn how to cook is at your fingertips. In fact, everything is far more accessible.
You can learn to play the guitar in a fraction of the time it would have taken when I was growing up. Sifting through the information is now the biggest challenge, whereas, before the internet age, the information was more difficult to access. As Will Hunting once said, “It’s all in the library”, now we just carry around thousands of libraries in our pockets.
As a result, one can learn to do many things on their own.
Learn How to Cook
Understand What You're Doing
Dispel the Mystique
Mysticism of Cooking
The author is a surgeon-scientist, which is a surgeon who also has a PhD in cancer biology and works in the laboratory to develop new cancer treatments.
A deep knowledge of biochemistry provides a certain lens to view the art and science of cooking, not always something useful or interesting to know, but… it often is. These principles help generalise and understand what the goal is and develops it into a system of sorts.
Knowing why you’re doing things a certain way unveils much of the mysticism of cooking, making it a far more enjoyable and rewarding experience, at least at the moment, we’ll see what happens!
Cook Book Recipes
To be Continued...
The journey is alive and continuing, with a second book in process. It’s not written by someone who has become a professional chef, who has worked it all out and presented it perhaps having forgotten how hard it was to learn to cook in the first place; so come and join the ride.
A few early dishes
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